"The whole world is a stage, / On it the actors are both women and men; / Their entrances are here and their exits, / And many roles are played by one / In this play of seven acts.” Few people know that these many-heard lines of W. Shakespeare belong to the melancholy traveler Jacques, one of the characters of the play As You Like It. A tragicomedy about Rosalind hiding in the forest from the persecution of her noble relatives in the 16th and 17th centuries. offered a completely new concept of love at the junction: W. Shakespeare opposes the view of love as a source of suffering formed by literature at that time with the concept of love as the greatest pleasure.
Born during the State Vilnius Small Theater Festival "DramaFest", the play "As You Like It" explores the themes of love, physicality, gender bending and sexuality, revolution. "When our generation of millennials is accused of sexualizing everything and trying to address questions of identity only through the prism of sexuality, I think the best answer to that accusation is that it seems like the world has lost an entire generation of people who used to be able to talk about it. I don't understand the idea that people's spiritual problems are bigger than the challenges of human identity. But after all, spiritual problems arise for a person who has one or another identity. A person constantly rethinks himself and his place in society - if this is not an ontological problem of being, then I don't know what those problems are", says Uršulė Bartoševičiūtė, one of the most prominent directors of the feminist trend in Lithuanian theatre.
The performance, which will take place in the cafe located in the basement of the Vilnius State Small Theater, will transport the audience to the underground metro station. "For me, the Vilnius metro is a symbol of a stupid, unmeasured, short-term, very impulsive, illogical dream. Here in the cafe, we are actually six feet underground, in the basement. For me, this cold, damp, unsafe underground world becomes a kind of playground," says the director.
Shakespeare's "As You Like It" is characterized by a special fragmentation, great dynamics of changing spaces. The performance creates an impression of the intense, bustling life rhythm of a megalopolis. The creative group sets itself the task of adapting and playing with W. Shakespeare's themes, changing the perspective to inert thought processes: does the stolen power restored by blood restore the divine order, or does it only deepen the culture of reshaping power? Can the fugitive Jester, a slave to no one, throw off the mechanisms of coercion and exist independent of another? How do you heal from the wounds of love and are these wounds really as universal as they are commonly thought? What is the declaration of love, its carving in the bark of trees - the great, true expression of love or the graphomaniac manifestation of the ego?
Theater based on fantasy and ingenuity, which is characteristic of the director's work, maneuvering on the border of kitsch, absurdity, and camp, remains the essential key of her work, emphasizing the fragmented nature of the world.
Under the guise of W. Shakespeare's ornate poetic texts, Renaissance costumes, an eclectic mix of Renaissance and contemporary music, "As You Like It" offers absurdity and fantasy as the only way out of inert fables.
This production of W. Shakespeare's play "As You Like It" is a radical adaptation, when the director does not serve the play, but it becomes the material for creativity and self-expression. Out of almost 30 characters, only 6 actors remain, and when adapting the play, U. Bartoševičiūtė borrows texts from various characters and pastes them. Because this kind of adaptation is refined more through the thematic perspective than through the perspective of character consistency.
According to the director, the play is actually about love and all its forms.
After all, love works both as an addiction and as a control mechanism, love works in both violent and poetic ways, love can be both romantic and the love of a friend, sister, love for someone just like you - as a process of identification, unification. And when you say that the play is about love, it seems that it is extremely banal.
Dir. Uršulė Bartoševičiūtė
